Nina Totenberg
Nina Totenberg is NPR's award-winning legal affairs correspondent. Her reports air regularly on NPR's critically acclaimed newsmagazines All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition.
Totenberg's coverage of the Supreme Court and legal affairs has won her widespread recognition. She is often featured in documentaries — most recently RBG — that deal with issues before the court. As Newsweek put it, "The mainstays [of NPR] are Morning Edition and All Things Considered. But the creme de la creme is Nina Totenberg."
In 1991, her ground-breaking report about University of Oklahoma Law Professor Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment by Judge Clarence Thomas led the Senate Judiciary Committee to re-open Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings to consider Hill's charges. NPR received the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for its gavel-to-gavel coverage — anchored by Totenberg — of both the original hearings and the inquiry into Anita Hill's allegations, and for Totenberg's reports and exclusive interview with Hill.
That same coverage earned Totenberg additional awards, including the Long Island University George Polk Award for excellence in journalism; the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for investigative reporting; the Carr Van Anda Award from the Scripps School of Journalism; and the prestigious Joan S. Barone Award for excellence in Washington-based national affairs/public policy reporting, which also acknowledged her coverage of Justice Thurgood Marshall's retirement.
Totenberg was named Broadcaster of the Year and honored with the 1998 Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcasting from the National Press Foundation. She is the first radio journalist to receive the award. She is also the recipient of the American Judicature Society's first-ever award honoring a career body of work in the field of journalism and the law. In 1988, Totenberg won the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for her coverage of Supreme Court nominations. The jurors of the award stated, "Ms. Totenberg broke the story of Judge (Douglas) Ginsburg's use of marijuana, raising issues of changing social values and credibility with careful perspective under deadline pressure."
Totenberg has been honored seven times by the American Bar Association for continued excellence in legal reporting and has received more than two dozen honorary degrees. On a lighter note, Esquire magazine twice named her one of the "Women We Love."
A frequent contributor on TV shows, she has also written for major newspapers and periodicals — among them, The New York Times Magazine, The Harvard Law Review, The Christian Science Monitor, and New York Magazine, and others.
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In June, the court ruled that Alabama's Republican-drawn congressional map violated the Voting Rights Act. -
The military has long maintained that the nation's security depends on having a diverse officer corps that is ready to lead an increasingly diverse fighting force.
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Students for Fair Admission, the conservative group that won a Supreme Court ban on affirmative action programs, is suing West Point to eliminate all racial considerations in the academy's admissions.
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Alabama is once again asking the Supreme Court to let it keep Republican-drawn congressional districts. In essence, the state is fighting a court order that the high court upheld just months ago.
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His statement came after Sen. Dick Durbin, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote to the chief justice, urging that steps be taken to assure that Alito not take part in the tax case.
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Justice Clarence Thomas, who has been the subject of scrutiny over gifts he received from billionaire Harlan Crow, reported additional trips Crow paid for in newly released financial disclosure forms.
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In a statement accompanying Thursday's disclosure, a lawyer for Thomas said there had been "no willful ethics transgressions" and called prior reporting errors "strictly inadvertent."
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The Senate Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to send to the Senate floor a bill that would require the Supreme Court to issue a code of ethics for itself.
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Feelings seem raw at the court, certainly for the court's three liberal justices, who were on the losing end of some of the court's biggest cases this term, but also for the conservatives.
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Chief Justice Roberts kept a firm grip on the court. He assigned himself four of the seven most important opinions, including affirmative action, and he won some more nuanced outcomes.
